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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Mini Quilt Madness

The railing for the upstairs landing of my house has been a quilt display rack and storage spot for some time now, but since my left shoulder froze up it has also become Quilt Top Limbo. My shoulder is starting to improve so I am able to do short periods of rotary cutting now, but I still can't baste or quilt anything much larger than a mini without later wishing for sweet, sweet death to come take me from this living hell.

I've mentioned my sampler about a bajillion times, I know, and I'm not showing it because I keep thinking I'm going to turn it into a pattern or do a quilt-along with it, or a BOM kinda thing, but I feel like I can't do any of that until it's an actual quilt and not just a top - so that's on the pile.

Then there's the quilt I made for a friend so I can't show that either and I can't send that one out to be quilted because I am pathological about needing it to have been done by only MY HANDS.

Then Harper felt a Halloween quilt was in order and she really wanted one she had found on Instagram. Turned out to be a free pattern from Andover. We scoured our already ample Halloween stash and added a few more pieces and made this:

So that's four quilt tops just hanging out on my railing. And yeah, I know most of you are rolling your eyes and going, "FOUR quilt tops? That's nothing. I haven't quilted a top since 1974 and several of them have fused together under the weight of them all. I spit upon your puny, unfused collection." But puny as it may be, I still don't like amassing tops I can't finish. My Weird and Wonderful Thing showed me that there's a lot of creativity and satisfaction to be found in smaller projects, so I decided to focus on mini quilts for a while.

As I have mentioned ad nauseam, Instagram is really becoming my social network of choice. I'm increasingly unhappy with Facebook as both a personal social medium and a business one. Facebook doesn't want to show you my posts unless there's a lot of engagement on them, and they seem to actively suppress posts that they then want me to "boost" by giving them money. I'm not entirely opposed to that, but they keep telling me I have offensive content and though they take my money anyway, my "boost" doesn't reach very far because they're making some sort of super-safe guesses as to who can safely view my extremely incendiary prose. Fucking cockwankers.

Instagram, owned now by the algorithm-happy folks at Facebook, has historically been a little more straightforward (though even that is changing). And I just like the simplicity of it. Just photographs and comments. No links. (I could go into a long treatise here about why the links on Facebook are detrimental to everyone's well-being, but I'll refrain. We've all been through enough this week.) In fact, Instagram is where I discovered swapping and the joys of mini quilts.

But like everything that involves people, we can't have nice things. Not for long anyway. I found that some people were being pushed out of swaps because their skills were not as good as many of the other people swapping, and that's where I had to draw a line. But then I also realized that what I really liked about swapping was not so much getting something but being creative within a set of rules set up by someone else. Like, for instance, a Disney-themed swap and the recipient really likes appliqué, Alison Glass fabrics, and the color teal. I like having a set of constraints like that and then seeing what I can do within them to make it fun and challenging for me. I just didn't want to do it from swapping anymore.

So I came up with an idea I decided to call Mini Quilt Madness. On Instagram, i posted a series of choices, and went with the majority vote. Rather than work in a color scheme, I decided to use one collection, but gave people a choice to vote from four:

The overwhelming choice was for Sherlock down there on the bottom left (Raindrop by Rashida Coleman-Hale). Then I asked if I should do patchwork, appliqué, or paper piecing and everybody wanted paper piecing, so I gave them several choices and the majority went with Up and Away by Whole Circle Studio.

Now that I had my parameters, I set to work and posted update photos each day.

But I really felt something, or someone, needed to be riding in that balloon. Something that would really make this little quilt feel like mine.

So, naturally I added an octopus.

By the time all was said and done, I had done paper piecing, appliqué, trapunto, embroidery, free motion quilting, and hand quilting. I freaking loved it.

And then I gave it away.

Yep. Every time a person participated in one of the choices I offered, their name went in a hat, and when it was all done I chose one and sent the quilt to her. Now there's a lovely lady in Montana who has this hanging in her office, and I couldn't be happier.

I love making things. I love stretching my creative muscle just a bit farther each time I make something. I don't need to keep everything I make.

But apparently I do need to put an octopus on it.

I'll be doing this again soon, so if you aren't following me on Instagram you can find me as @thebitchystitcher. (And yes, you really need a smartphone or tablet.)